California Democratic gubernatorial front-runner Xavier Becerra went viral yesterday for saying to a local Los Angeles television (KTLA) reporter, after she asked a hard question, “By the way, this is a profile piece, this is not a gotcha piece, right?” Reporter Annie Rose Ramos responded, appropriately, “These questions are fair. It’s in order to learn about you as a candidate.”
Progressives responded by criticizing Becerra’s messaging. A progressive Pod Save America co-host and former Obama spokesman, posted on X, “Politicians and candidates…let your staff have these whiny conversations! Or at least don’t do it on camera!” Former Obama strategist David Axelrod wrote that Becerra, as HHS Secretary during COVID, “rarely was the administration’s point person in communicating to the American people on the pandemic,” adding that the KTLA exchange “may be the reason why.”
But the underlying problem is not that Becerra is a poor communicator but rather that he is the person responsible for losing 85,000 migrant children under Biden’s open borders policy, which was what KTLA’s Ramos asked about. When Becerra was Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), its Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) could not reach more than 85,000 unaccompanied children after releasing them to sponsors. Eleven ORR managers warned in a July 2021 memo that labor trafficking was rising and that the system “rewards individuals for making quick releases, and not one that rewards individuals for preventing unsafe releases.” The New York Times found 13-year-olds working in meat plants, 12-year-olds at Hyundai and Kia supplier factories, and children who should have been in middle school working at commercial bakeries.
